What is Code Obfuscation?

Patent laws, copyright laws, hackers and plagiarists make it very hard for programmers to exercise their Intellectual Property Rights over the code they have created. Hence the need for obfuscation. Some codes are easier to obfuscate than others. In this paper several techniques for the technical protection of software secrets are described and reviewed. Also, in this paper data obfuscation, the class of obfuscation techniques that zero in on the data structures in the software, is discussed. This paper finally discusses some possible deobfuscation techniques (such as program slicing).

When a programmer spends hours writing code, its only logical that such code be patented. But copyright laws and patent laws (uspto.gov), do not serve all the needs of a programmer. One way of preventing plagiarism and hacking is to employ code obfuscation.


Defining obfuscation
Here is a definition: Obfuscated code (Wikipedia, is that is (perhaps intentionally) very hard to read and understand. Some languages are more prone to obfuscation than others. are most often cited as easily "obfuscatable" languages. Macro preprocessors are often used to create hard to read code by masking the standard language syntax and grammar from the main body of code.

Code obfuscation : Some methods described
Obfuscation methods are classified based on the information they focus on The basic ones are aimed at the lexical structure of the code.  Others , as mentioned before, zero in on the data structures. The control flow is also a major area of focus.. Obfuscation methods are further classified based on the kind of operation they perform on the targeted information. The different obfuscation methods (Collberg et al,) are:

Layout obfuscation: Aims at the layout of the application, such as the formatting of the source code formatting,names of the variable names and finally the comments.

Data obfuscation: A widely used method,it zeroes in on the data structures used by the code.